Best oldschool RPG ever: Exile III

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Exile III was one of the most amazing, nostalgic games which I still play. It’s based on old D&D character creation, but with some unique differences in skills, etc. The point is that you level up your party while you are exploring the surface world. You’ve been banished to the underground “pit” civilization called “Exile”.

You are an adventurer party which explores the surface, reporting back to your Exile coordinator about the things you find up there.

Things get complicated as the story progresses, but it’s very heavily open-ended in the game play style. You literally go where your little heart leads you, finding out more and more about the surface in a very non-linear way. There are tons of “side” plots that you can discover. As time progresses, cities and towns literally become overrun and sometimes destroyed by the forces at work in the world, keeping you interested in the world you’ve become a part of.

The game came as a trial, which impedes you from travelling further north than an predefined invisible line. I won’t promote pirating a serial key or an EXE patcher, but let it be known that I have seen one of the latter once upon a time, and the game was remade as Avernum (which I didn’t like nearly as much, for several reasons) and so Exile III has been cast aside.

The game comes with a save-game editor, which is pretty sweet. Most of the good stuff is enabled only after registering, but you still get several freebies like “heal hp/mp”, or “make towns forget you” (for those times where you decided to lead an assault on those innocent citizens of the town, thereby invoking the never-dying wrath of the town’s guards). Of course, no game is fun if you cheat your way through it, but at the same time, no game is fun if it is mercilessly hard with no hope for success if you’re ever in a weird jam.

Some notes about the playing the game:

The installer you download from the Spidersoft page is actually more like a self-extracting exe. So, when you run it, it will expand the *real* installer into the same directory, so make a temp folder first and place the “exile3v10.exe” file into it before running it. After extracting run the “INSTALL.EXE” program to begin.

The installer is a bit archaic, and defaults to the C drive, no matter what your main drive is.

The installer can’t install to a directory with spaces or hyphens in its name. It’s no problem though, if you install it someplace easy first, and then just move the installed folder to the spot where you want it (including paths with spaces).

All of the graphics are just bitmaps in the local game directory, so you can edit them to be whatever you want! 😀 This makes for some fun edits, like making one of the characters a giant Yoshi, or something. My personal idea for a character set will be posted soon for anybody to download 😉

Vista and Windows 7 sort of molest the game, so I just set it to run in compatibility mode for Win95, and everything got better.

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Danzig(01:15:24) :

Exile was one of the best RPG’s I have ever played. Specifically III, for some reason I landed on that one first and ended up going back to the other 2 (both great). Avernum just didn’t capture the same experience for me (think it might have been the lack of “outdoor” mode…) anyway, always glad to meet a fellow fan 😉